Social Media in Rural China: Social Networks and Moral Frameworks

By Tom McDonald

China’s distinctive social media platforms have gained notable popularity among the nation’s vast number of internet users, but has China’s countryside been ‘left behind’ in this communication revolution?

Tom McDonald spent 15 months living in a small rural Chinese community researching how the residents use social media in their daily lives. His ethnographic findings suggest that, far from being left behind, many rural Chinese people have already integrated social media into their everyday experience.

Throughout his ground-breaking study, McDonald argues that social media allows rural people to extend and transform their social relationships by deepening already existing connections with friends known through their school, work or village, while also experimenting with completely new forms of relationships through online interactions with strangers, particularly when looking for love and romance. By juxtaposing these seemingly opposed relations, rural social media users are able to use these technologies to understand, capitalise on and challenge the notions of morality that underlie rural life.

Praise for Social Media in Rural China

'The two freely accessible books [Social Media in Industrial China and Social Media in Rural China] are conceived as introductions for the public at large, theoretical references being deliberately kept limited and relegated to the last parts. They offer the generalist reader very vivid and contextualised descriptions of social media usages in two very different milieus in China, but perhaps leave the more specialist readers craving more in terms of theoretical discussions and overviews of existing literature. They nevertheless represent an invitation to read the works of synthesis stemming from this collective research project, which ought to meet the demand for more theoretical generalisations'
China Perspectives

• Language: English
• Publisher: UCL Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781910634707

Tom McDonald

Tom McDonald is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in Anthropology from UCL in 2013 and has published numerous academic articles on internet use and consumption practices in China.

Book preview

Social Media in Rural China

Social Media in Rural China

Social Networks and Moral Frameworks

Tom McDonald

First published in 2016 by

UCL Press

University College London

Gower Street

London WC1E 6BT

Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press

Text © Tom McDonald, 2016

Images © Tom McDonald, 2016

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library.

This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

ISBN: 978–1–910634–67–7 Hbk.)

ISBN: 978–1–910634–68–4 (Pbk.)

ISBN: 978–1–910634–69–1 (PDF)

ISBN: 978–1–910634–70–7 (epub)

ISBN: 978–1–910634–71–4 (mobi)

ISBN: 978–1–911307–31–0 (html)

DOI: 10.14324/111.9781910634691

Introduction to the series Why We Post

This book is one of a series of 11 titles. Nine are monographs devoted to specific field sites (including this one) in Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey – they will be published in 2016–17. The series also includes a comparative book about all of our findings, published to accompany this title, and a book which contrasts the visuals that people post on Facebook in this same English field site with those on our Trinidadian field site.

When we tell people that we have written nine monographs about social media around the world, and that they all have the same chapter headings (apart from Chapter 5), they are concerned about potential repetition. However, if you decide to read several of these books (which we very much hope you do), you will see that this device has been helpful in showing the precise opposite. Each book is as individual and distinct as if it were on an entirely different topic.

This is perhaps our single most important finding. Most studies of the internet and social media are based on research methods that assume we can generalise across different groups. We look at tweets in one place and write about ‘Twitter’. We conduct tests about social media and friendship in one population, and then write on this topic as if friendship means the same thing for all populations. By presenting nine books with the same chapter headings, you can judge for yourselves what kinds of generalisations are, or are not, possible.

Our intention is not to evaluate social media either positively or negatively. The purpose is educational, providing detailed evidence of what social media has become in each place, and the local consequences, including local evaluations.

Each book is based on 15 months of research during which time most of the anthropologists lived, worked and interacted with people, always in the local language. Yet they differ from the dominant tradition of writing social science books. Firstly they do not engage with the academic literatures on social media. It would be highly repetitive to have the same discussions in all nine books. Instead discussions of these literatures are to be found in our comparative book, How the World Changed Social Media. Secondly these monographs are not comparative, which again is the primary function of this other volume. Thirdly, given the immense interest in social media from the general public, we have tried to write in an accessible and open style. This means we have adopted a mode more common in historical writing of keeping all citations and the discussion of all wider academic issues to endnotes. If you prefer to read above the line, each text offers a simple narrative about our findings. If you want to read a more conventional academic book that relates the material to its academic context, this can be done through engaging with the footnotes.

We hope you enjoy the results, and we hope you will also read our comparative book – and perhaps some of the other monographs – in addition to this one.

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks first of all go to the people of Anshan Town, who not only took me in as a stranger, but did everything they could to help me during my field work in the town. Their patience, generosity and warmth have formed the most enduring memories of field work that I have.

I am especially grateful to a number of other individuals in China who helped me navigate the administrative and practical challenges of conducting field work in the country. Zhang Ying from Minzu University of China and Qi Xiaoguang of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University helped with institutional affiliations and introductions, in addition to providing practical advice throughout the project. I am incredibly grateful to Liu Zhixian and Li Yinxue from Minzu University of China who both spent three months with me in Anshan Town acting as my research assistants; your contribution to the project has been enormous. Gillian Bolsover and Kiki Wang both stayed in Anshan Town for a week to produce an incredible series of photographs and films respectively; their hard work added an important extra dimension to the project.

My thanks to the Why We Post project team: Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Laura Haapio-Kirk, Sheba Mohammid, Razvan Nicolescu, Pascale Searle, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman and Xinyuan Wang. Working with you all has been incredible, and I am amazed at what has resulted from this co-operation. A special thanks to Daniel Miller for making the project happen in the first place, and for continuing always to support and encourage me as I grow and learn. A project of this scale and methodological originality would have been simply impossible had it not been for the generous (and brave!) funding of the European Research Council (Grant number: 2011-AdG-295486 SocNet).

There are a number of other colleagues at the UCL Department of Anthropology who have inspired me greatly since my undergraduate days and have provided much guidance on this and other projects. Special mentions go to Allen Abramson, Victor Buchli, Timothy Carroll, Ludovic Coupaye, Adam Drazin, Alice Elliot, Rebecca Empson, Haidy Geismar, Martin Holbraad, David Jeevendrampillai, Susan Kuechler, Alison MacDonald, Aaron Parkhurst, Vita Peacock and Raphael Schacter.

I must also extend my thanks to my new colleagues at the Department of Sociology at The University of Hong Kong; they have welcomed me warmly and have been understanding while I have attempted to juggle my other duties with completing this manuscript. Particular thanks go to Cheris Chan, Travis Kong, Karen Laidler, Maggy Lee, David Palmer and Tommy Tse in this regard.

During the process of writing this book a number of individuals have kindly commented on either draft chapters I have shared or on presentations of my work that I have given. These include Allan Bahroun, Paul Bouanchaud, Inge Daniels, Faye Ginsburg, Heather Horst, David Kurt Herold, John Hope, Freddy MacKee, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Jesper Schlæger, Charles Stafford, Hans Steinmüller and Marina Svensson, and the anonymous reviewers of this volume. I am especially grateful for the advice received from these individuals which has helped improve the manuscript enormously, although any remaining inaccuracies should be viewed as mine alone. I am particularly thankful to the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford; the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University; and the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong for inviting me to present and receive feedback on my work in their seminars.

I am also extremely indebted to the fantastic team at UCL Press, led by Lara Speicher, for the opportunity to publish the entire book series via Open Access. They have worked with particular dedication and professionalism in guiding this volume through the production process.

A final round of thanks goes to close friends and family, who have had to endure my pre occupation with my work during this project. My own ‘circle of friends’ in London continue to bring happiness to my life, albeit from afar. A special mention is aimed at Wang Qiyao who has provided exceptional support and encouragement in recent months. I am, most of all, grateful to my parents, my brother Tim and his partner Manchi, who have not only tolerated my constant wandering over the years, but responded to it with a good humour and patience that always astounds me. Thank you.

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Note on the text

1. Introduction and field site: Down to the countryside

2. The social media landscape: Visibility and economy

3. Visual postings: Idealising family – love, marriage and ‘little treasures’

4. Relationships: Circles of friends, encounters with strangers

5. Moral accumulation: Collecting credits on social media

6. Broader relations: The family, the state and social media

7. Conclusion: Circles and strangers, media moralities and ‘the Chinese internet’

Appendix – Methodology

Glossary of selected Chinese terms

Notes

References

Index

List of figures

Fig. 1.1 Location of Anshan Town in China

Fig. 1.2 A Daoist temple in Anshan Town

Fig. 1.3 Houses in the ‘old’ part of a village

Fig. 1.4 Houses in the ‘new’ part of a village

Fig. 1.5 Mixed housing in an outlying village

Fig. 1.6 Frequency of households owning typical electric appliances

Fig. 1.7 Frequency of households owning vehicles

Fig. 2.1 QQ Instant Messenger main window

Fig. 2.2 An individual user’s WeChat Moments profile

Fig. 2.3 Neighbouring users listed on WeChat’s People Nearby feature

Fig. 2.4 WeChat Drift Bottle feature

Fig. 2.5 Smartphone/feature phone ownership rates for Chinese youth

Fig. 2.6 A China Telecom promotion distributing plastic washbasins among townsfolk

Fig. 2.7 Advert for broadband and other telecoms services on village home exterior

Fig. 2.8 Computer placed in a hair salon

Fig. 3.1 Black and white baby photo taken during the 1970s

Fig. 3.2 Colour one hundred-day baby photo taken during the 1990s

Fig. 3.3 Spread from a printed photo album, produced in 2013

Fig. 3.4 Living room of a young married couple

Fig. 3.5 An infant girl in a one hundred-day photograph (after studio editing)

Fig. 3.6 Unedited photo studio images posted on Qzone

Fig. 3.7 Meme of couple kissing shared on Qzone

Fig. 3.8 Meme of couple kissing shared on Qzone

Fig. 3.9 Meme of couple holding hands in front of marriage registration office

Fig. 3.10 Meme of couple embracing on basketball court

Fig. 3.11 Meme of couple embracing

Fig. 3.12 Romantic meme shared on Qzone

Fig. 3.13 Meme of series of flowers

Fig. 3.14 Meme of cartoon couple embracing

Fig. 3.15 Romantic meme shared on Qzone

Fig. 3.16 Romantic cartoon meme

Fig. 4.1 University City near Bai Town

Fig. 5.1 A QQ Farm with user’s level displayed on green toolbar

Fig. 5.2 User’s QQ level and ‘Super QQ’ privilege status displayed on their profile page

Fig. 5.3 The toolbar of a Windows PC in a business in Anshan Town. The four penguins denote four separate social media accounts that are logged in at the same time

Fig. 5.4 Areas of online spending by social media users

Fig. 6.1 News appearing among recent conversations in WeChat

Fig. 6.2 Analysis of themes appearing in Tencent news articles

Fig. 6.3 Tencent news articles concerning court proceedings

Fig. 6.4 Sina Weibo posting shared by Jinan Weibo information

Fig. 6.5 Sina Weibo posting promoting Anshan Town cherry-picking festival

Fig. 6.6 Anshan Town cherry-picking festival opening ceremony

Fig. 6.7 Meme showing former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao eating in a communal canteen

Fig. 6.8 Anti-Japanese meme shared on Qzone

List of tables

Table 1.1 Household size distribution among survey respondents

Table 1.2 Survey results showing reported types of sibling relations among middle school students

Table 1.3 Popularity of vehicle types in Anshan Town

Table 2.1 Popularity of social media platforms in Anshan Town

Table 2.2 Popularity of Chinese social media platforms worldwide

Table 2.3 Lowest price-point 3G plans available from China Mobile store in Anshan Town during May 2013

Table 2.4 Middle school students’ responses to survey question ‘Where do you access the internet most?’

Table 4.1 Middle school students’ response to survey question ‘Do your parents use the internet?’

Table 4.2 Middle school students’ response to survey question ‘Do your parents control your internet use?’

Table 4.3 Middle school students’ social media account ownership by platform

Table 4.4 Middle school students’ response to survey question ‘Which media is the most suitable to discuss matters of the heart or to declare one’s love?’

Table 5.1 ‘Active online days’ through online time accrual rate

Table 5.2 QQ Membership yearly accrual status

Table 5.3 Super QQ Membership yearly accrual status

Table 5.4 QQ IM’s graphical representation of levels

Table 5.5 Graphical representation of Qzone level system

Table 5.6 Typical daily schedule of a second-grade middle school student

Table 6.1 Newspaper circulation estimates for Anshan Town

Note on the text

Transliteration

Names and certain words and quotations have been written in Mandarin, and Romanised according to the standard Pinyin system. A glossary of selected Pinyin terms with their accompanying Chinese characters and English equivalents is provided at the back of the volume.

Names

All personal and place (below provincial level) names have been altered to preserve the anonymity of participants in this study. A full discussion on anonymity appears in Chapter 1. Chinese personal names are written according to the normal ordering in Chinese (family name, followed by given name), with the exception of those authors of Chinese descent who have chosen to use alternative orderings or versions of their names in publications (i.e. Xinyuan Wang, Mayfair Yang).

Currency

RMB denotes renminbi, the official currency of mainland China. On the first day of conducting field work in China for this project (1 April 2013), US$1 was equal to 6.2 RMB.

1

Introduction and field site: Down to the countryside

I had been living in rural Anshan Town for a couple of months when Li Kang, a local married man in his mid-twenties, invited me to accompany him on a short trip to a neighbouring town to run some errands. As we sat in his car I asked him to add me as a friend on WeChat (a popular Chinese social media platform). He explained that he could not do so, having deleted his own account a few days earlier. In the privacy of his car, he candidly recounted how a few days ago his wife, having (correctly) suspected that he had been using WeChat to meet and flirt with a woman from the nearby city, demanded to see her husband’s phone. Li Kang, wishing to destroy any evidence of this, deleted the entire account from his phone and claimed he no longer used the service.

Li Kang’s admission was striking as it contradicted other parts of his online profiles that I had seen. We were already friends on Qzone (another social media platform particularly popular among Anshan Town residents), where his profile page was full of family pictures, statements made during trips away saying that he could not wait to return home to his family and memes regarding love and marriage. As I got to know Li Kang better, I realised his social media use oscillated between these two drastically different forms of social encounter: on the one hand, private one-to-one messaging, not only with friends and family, but also strangers; on the other, the family-oriented postings he openly shared with friends and relatives on his social media profile. That people have secrets, and present themselves differently to different people, is no particular revelation. However, social media places these sharply contrasting types of sociality adjacent to one another. This opposition seems even more extreme when it occurs in rural China, where these new modes of interaction are emerging against particularly prescriptive and constraining local moral norms.

Cases such as Li Kang’s thus bring into sharp focus social media’s effect on the experience of everyday moral decision making in contemporary rural China. It is in the context of these judgements surrounding the appropriateness of such technologies that this volume describes how, despite social media being a global phenomenon, its use always becomes articulated in specific, local ways. A key area for this book is the ongoing tension between two seemingly opposed types of relationships: ‘friends’ and ‘strangers’. The first involves closed ‘circles’ of personal friends from familiar, established and enduring offline social spheres (i.e. family, village, school and work), while the second allows users to find and interact with complete strangers for a variety of reasons, from romance to platonic friendship and sometimes just for relief from the intense familiarity of rural social life. As such, social media can be seen as a medium through which individuals extend and deepen a range of contrasting social relations, in addition to – on occasion – experimenting with ways to rework and redefine the boundaries of such relations.

While this opposition between relationships of ‘circles and strangers’ constitutes a major focus of this volume, its broader objective is to provide a detailed ethnographic account of the use and consequences of social media in contemporary rural China. The majority of existing studies on internet and social media use in China have primarily focused on urban settings. This study aims to redress this imbalance, exploring not only the differences and commonalities of social media use between rural and urban China, but also how these platforms increasingly challenge such distinctions in the first place. The evidence for the analysis was collected during 15 months of ethnographic field work while I lived in Anshan Town and participated in its residents’ lives. This allowed me to witness – and be part of – everyday rural Chinese life for myself.

As part of the field work, I befriended my research participants and sought to understand their online activities in the context of their offline lives, including their social relationships, work, how they spent their free time and their broader views and beliefs. This sustained engagement often gave participants the confidence to share intimate details of how their lives were being reshaped through their use of social media (as seen in the above case of Li Kang), with many transformations being directly related to the town’s changing social landscape. This approach differs from many other studies of social media and the internet which attempt to understand the impact of such technologies purely through what happens online. Instead, I have tried to ‘treat internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces’.¹

This volume describes the role social media plays in contributing to, reflecting and allowing rural Chinese individuals to think through some of the major transformations occurring in their everyday lives.

Chapter outline: from circles to strangers

The book consists of seven chapters. As the volume progresses, the focus gradually shifts from profiling interactions with family and ‘circles’ of friends on social media to describing the growing frequency of encounters with strangers on the same platforms. Following this outline of the book, the current chapter sets the scene by reviewing existing scholarly approaches to the internet and social media in China, explaining the methodology of this study and introducing Anshan Town and its inhabitants.

The second chapter then moves on to examine how people in Anshan Town access the internet and the social media platforms they use. Two key discoveries are presented. Firstly, it is shown that the most frequent users of social media among townsfolk are students, young people and younger adults. Secondly, it is shown how periods of migration to urban areas result in users adopting a more diverse range of social media platforms. This chapter thus emphasises the breadth and variety of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the town, and shows how social media use (and preferences toward using specific platforms or features) often corresponds to particular social groups. A key factor determining the appeal of different social media platforms is the level of visibility they offer, something which is conducive to online sociality among both circles of known friends and with strangers.

Chapter 3 considers what people in Anshan Town actually post on their social media profiles. It demonstrates that the most popular kinds of visual postings relate to the topics of raising children or the romantic ideal of love and marriage. These postings therefore work to reproduce and reinforce idealised family relationships, which is especially significant given that the audience of these posts primarily consist of closed circles of familiar friends. This is an indication that the townsfolk attempt to use social media in ways they feel are in keeping with their existing moral frameworks and which communicate common sets of ethical values within one’s own circle of friends.

Chapter 4 describes the dominance of non-kin relations based on principles of familiarity within these circles, highlighting the classmate group as a defining feature of such associations. This chapter also notes how, in contrast to these familiar social groupings, young people in particular are increasingly using social media to interact with strangers, including as a means of forming romantic relationships. The growing popularity and ease with which these stranger finding services can be accessed is shown to result in some married couples also interpreting the stranger as a threat, fearing that social media use will lead to adultery, and ultimately resulting in couples generally avoiding such platforms as communication channels. The evidence indicates that social media challenges accepted understandings of the principle of familiarity as central to social relationships in rural China. In so doing, Chapter 4 also demonstrates how individuals use social media to conceptualise and respond to broader social change.

Chapter 5 examines the various systems that award points and levels to users, which are prevalent on many Chinese social media platforms. Young students in the town’s schools find these systems particularly appealing, as they offer opportunities for distinction and progression. Level accumulation means users often have to draw on the help of others from their own circle of online friends, despite this being at odds with the distinction such systems create within circles. Here the popularity of accumulating levels takes on a moral dimension, and is explained in relation to a broader Chinese cultural orientation associated with entrepreneurialism. In this context, in addition to level accumulation being seen as an outward-facing status accumulating activity, users also describe the practice as having an important inward-facing aspect of self-improvement. The diligence, perseverance and even manipulation demanded of users to successfully accumulate levels therefore becomes an ethical activity. The chapter also notes the important role of physical money in these systems, which offers an accelerated route to higher status. This demonstrates how townsfolk see social media reflecting and embodying the broader changes in material consumption that have taken place in Chinese society in recent years.

Chapter 6 focuses on how the town’s social media users view and interact with broader sets of relations through these platforms, most notably local, regional and national levels of government. Censorship and propaganda are discussed from the perspective of how they are experienced by participants, who seek to understand them in relation to their own moral frameworks. This control over social media is then contrasted against the growing desire of some users to exploit its economic potential – again drawing on the virtuous nature of entrepreneurialism, albeit this time oriented towards exchange with strangers. Finally the chapter asks whether moral concerns regarding the consequences of social media use in the town may be partially addressed by reconfiguring the monetised nature of social media platforms.

The final chapter of this volume will discuss the broader significance of the study in three areas: circles and strangers, the morality of media and ‘the Chinese internet’. It will be argued that highlighting this study’s focus on sociality and the social relations occurring with circles of friends and of strangers online points towards the growth of individualistic ideals in the management of social relations in rural China. Secondly, it is asserted that a consideration of morality in relation to communication technology use can provide a particularly fruitful way to understand the ethical dilemmas facing ordinary Chinese citizens. Finally, the implications of the case of rural China on our understanding of the impact of the internet and social media more broadly are discussed, arguing that this specific case provokes us to challenge accepted ways of framing studies into technology use.

Ways of understanding social media in rural China

The chief aim of this volume is to provide a rounded account of how social media affects the lives of Anshan Town people. The separate comparative volume in the series discusses many of the theoretical debates that surround social media in general, including a detailed discussion of the specific approaches to carrying out ethnographies of social media.² For that reason, the focus of this literature review is confined to an overview of three key themes central